Educational Craft Project: Make a Catch-Cup Toy

This is a fun and easy craft project that helped my children work with their hand-eye coordination skills. It's easy to make and leaves them with an educational toy as well.

To make your catch-cup, you'll need a plastic cup, (up to six inches tall), at least two buttons, a couple feet of yarn, and some glue. The first thing you'll need to do is poke a hole in the bottom of your plastic cup.

This is the one part of the project that probably should be done by an adult or older child. You need a hole large enough to poke your yarn through that's small enough that your button won't go through. You can use the pointed edge of a kitchen knife or if you have one, a tool called an awl.

Once your cup has a hole in the bottom center, push your piece of yarn through that hole. On the end of the piece of yarn that's inside the cup, tie one of your buttons. If your buttons are different sizes, put the largest one on this end. Tie it securely, but don't pull it to the bottom of the cup yet.

Put a bit of glue on the underside of your button, and then pull your yarn through the bottom of the cup, until that button is sitting flat on the bottom of the inside of your cup with the glue underneath it. This will hold it securely in the cup with you piece of yarn dangling out the bottom of the cup.

Make sure you give your glue a chance to dry completely, so the button doesn't come loose!

Tie your other button onto the end of the yarn that's dangling underneath the cup. If you'd like to, you can decorate the outside of the cup as well. You can glue on additional buttons to decorate the outside of your cup, or you can use craft paints or stickers to dress it up.

Have your child hold the cup by the bottom, and swing it, so that the button on the end of the yarn flies upwards. As it begins to drop, they need to try to catch it in the open top of the cup. Make several of these and challenge your children against each other or against their parents to see how many times in a row they can catch buttons on their first try.

Try repeating this project with different lengths of yarns, and with different numbers of buttons dangling at the end of the string. For instance, you can tie two or three buttons to the string that's dangling down. This will make it heavier. Heavier and lighter buttons, and different lengths of string, will change the way the button moves through the air, making it more or less difficult.

This is a great opportunity to help your children discover principles of motion and inertia. This toy is popular, (but expensive!), in toy stores. Now you see that you can make one at home very inexpensively. They're just as much fun, and your children will take pride in having made the toy themselves.

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